KRUDER & DORFMEISTER
1 9 9 5

There is geological time and deep-space time. The natural worlds time, and quantum time. Humans started measuring time with the stars and seasons. Then came hourglasses and sundials. The first mechanical clocks weren’t in Europe until the late 13th century.

Then came industrial time, a wristwatch for all and then everything had a time. A time for everything.
All feeding into our recently digitised time and its marching nanoseconds. Let us not forget however another way to measure time: That would be K&D time.

Yes, you can rush, but isn’t it so much nicer to amble?
This conception of time may well have its roots in those smoke mists, softly blowing through the pre-history of 1995, and if that was time - then we need space.

In particular, one Viennese front room that has turned its bass bins out to the cosmos.
That sweet smoke, shrouding the desk and sampler. A few old keyboards (as a friend skins up at the back)
- unnoticed on the couch - just passing through…

Those days of K&D time had been thought to have gone. But one of times tricks is to hide itself in music.

Not long ago (after a box of DATs had been found, and a DAT player prised back into service) back through the music wormhole our heroes fell into that smoke laden room of 1995.

The remix time hadn’t arrived nor the intense touring schedule. It was before the K&D sessions release and all that came with it, before the solo projects of the Peace Orchestra and Tosca. This was a time before all of that. A time for literally living in the studio and experiencing the joy of creating tune after tune. Just the sound and the smoke and no boundaries.

It was before people started asking about when the album was coming out. Which developed it’s own time specific answers. The 90s answer was soon, 00s answer was not sure and then: never ! from 2010 onwards.

The truth was, an album had been finished by the spring of ’95 and all recorded onto DAT and placed in a box. K&D pressed up 10 copies and gave 4 away to some suitably eccentric individuals.
Then the room’s doors opened and in a tremendously big cloud of smoke time rushed in, K&D rushed out, and the years went rolling by. The days got filled with remixes, touring and life.

Then in early 2020 that chance moving of a box at the back of a room exposed the DATs and their time transporting properties. As K&D went through them they ended up comfortable and back in the room and that wonderful haze of 1995.

The music was transferred from the DATs and K&D painstakingly rebuilt every molecule that made up the original 10 copies. From the very first takes of the mixes printed onto tape, to the solid slab of black virgin vinyl, to the abused by many plays, white cover. Even down to the labels that says Unverkäufliche Musterplatte’’ (Testpressing - Not For Sale) in rather rude German.

It now looks, feels and sounds pretty much exactly the same as those original 10 copies did in 1995. The only thing that couldn’t be done is the original clouds of smoke those 10 copies were bathed in. That will be left to the listener to wrap it in the fresh harvest of 2020.

In one way it’s a musical time warp space travel. In another, if the music becomes classic and timeless, then it’s of its time, whatever the time.

So as the rooms bass bins are once again turned out towards the cosmos, K&D are happy and proud to release what they thought were lost moments. Drop through the worm hole, take your place on the couch. The friend who is skinning up, always just passing through, listening to an album for the future called 1995. It all makes sense if you measure in K&D time.

Kruder & Dorfmeister’s story is not just a story of refusal and renunciation. As the two started making music together in the early 1990s, there was hardly anything that the two didn’t do “wrong”, and therefore, exactly right.
At the time, Vienna was a metropolis of the aspiring techno movement and was active, during the initial heyday of the revolutionary style. But the two gentlemen, K&D, rather followed the tradition of the continental cosmic “dancefloor” of the 1980s, which searched for a universal language of dance music, influenced by hip hop, rare groove, dub, new wave and last but not least, of music that stood out between all those categories.
As the first post-acid jazz productions of labels like Ninja Tune or Mo Wax heralded a new era, Kruder & Dorfmeister were already a step ahead of those protagonists. The sound of K&D’s groundbreaking debut “G-Stoned”, already apparently influenced by the elegiac arrangements of productions from the 1960s and 1970s of Afro-jazz and Pink Floyd, made many top producers begin scratching the backs of their heads, asking themselves who could have generated such an organically-flowing, complex yet subtle sound with only two Akai samplers, a Roland Space Delay and a dusty mixer.
Offers came pouring in like heavy rainfall in a mid summers day, but the two stubborn gentlemen didn’t play along: after the success of their “DJ-Kicks” and “Sessions” CDs, which sold millions worldwide, they turned down most of them.
K&D always enjoyed not following advice and abandoned all of the enticing major offers, all of the promises of full-speed marketing machinery. Instead, they provided musician friends with distribution on their G-Stone label, hung out in the studio and put together follow-up projects, like Dorfmeister & Huber’s Tosca or Kruder’s Peace Orchestra.
Whoever heard the two DJing at the time, noticed that the cliché of smokey time-loop jazz had long been left behind and gave way to their own spirit of research. Besides excursions to drum & bass and sub-genres, such as broken beat, straight 4/4 rhythms crept into their sets and roughened up the eternal Balearic sunset.
To this day the two still maintain an open concept, influenced by a wide-ranging taste in music and their ability to hear music, to feel and to be able to realize their musical conceptions. Kruder & Dorfmeister’s career can, therefore, be more closely compared to that of major role model, Brian Eno, whose work, from Roxy Music or “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, to his productions with David Bowie and his “Music for Airports”, was similarly influenced by an all-embodying, perpetually visionary and never shortsighted understanding of music.
Since the beginning, the goal was to produce a very personalized sound, in which satisfying guidelines of genre was secondary. Peter Kruder ultimately proved that with his productions of DJ Hell’s celebrated “Teufelswerk” and “Zukunftsmusik” albums or Marsmobil’s chart topping “Fairytales Of The Supersurvivor” or the wonderful releases under his own name for Compost, Macro and Gigolo Records. Even Dorfmeister’s Tosca ceaselessly minimalist, almost dadaist tonal studies clearly point in that direction as his collaborations on the acclaimed “The Exchange” album.